VA Supreme Court: state has no duty to protect students from gunmen on campus

The state Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a jury’s wrongful death verdict against the state stemming from the 2007 killing of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The justices ruled in the case of two students whose families argued that they might have survived the rampage if the Blacksburg campus had been alerted earlier to the gunman’s initial shootings at a dormitory. Erin Nicole Peterson, Julia Kathleen Pryde and 28 other people were killed nearly three hours later in Norris Hall, a classroom building.

But the justices agreed with the state — that there was no way to anticipate the deadly intentions of studentSeung-Hui Cho, who killed himself after the killings.

“Based on the limited information available to the commonwealth at the time prior to the shootings in Norris Hall, it cannot be said that it was known or reasonably foreseeable that students in Norris Hall would fall victim to criminal harm,” the court wrote. “Thus, as a matter of law, the commonwealth did not have a duty to protect students against third party criminal acts.”